In 2024, I joined 2K Sports Lab, a new studio in Vancouver, BC, Canada which is assembling a team to fully realize an uncompromising vision for 2K's next phenomenal sports franchise.

I am currently a Senior Gameplay Designer in this project.

My role involves the following:

• Crafting and iterating on feature designs for character-based action mechanics and combat systems (movesets, balancing, input, animation requirements, AI requirements, etc).

• Owning the product for a major core area of the game. This involves supporting the team by presenting the creative vision (‘what good looks like’) and managing the backlog to ensure the goals are hit in due time.

• Partnering with the experts (programmers, animators, UI, audio) to implement the features with acute attention to detail, whilst leading an inclusive and positive environment for the team to contribute.

• Driving playtest sessions, collecting information to evaluate the current experience, and deciding what steps need to be taken to reach the intended gameplay experience.

• Researching, defining and presenting the feature designs, including documentation throughout these steps.

• Making strategic decisions on feature priorities to achieve the intended state of the game – what feature needs to be fixed at which time, setting up timebox for iterating, etc.

• Providing key feedback to other gameplay areas, always looking to collaboratively deliver a strong all-around experience.

Pulling No Punches is a beat'em up action game with frame-by-frame animation and supporting 4-player co-op. In this beat'em up game, players battle through a fictional pandemic in a city filled with madness and denial.

As Lead Designer and Engineer, I helped Pulling No Punches get successfully crowdfunded locally in Brazil (the game is called Punhos de Repúdio in Portuguese).

The full version of the game shipped for Steam in 2022 as an indie, and for Nintendo Switch in 2023 via publisher QuByte Interactive.

My leading role in this project involved a long list of responsibilities:

• 3Cs Hero Design (Character, Camera and Controller)

• Agile development and iteration of Combat systems

• Developing deeply modular mechanics with frame-perfect, player-centric features such as animation cancelling, "coyote jump" and selective input buffering, allowing for smooth reiterations during the design process while delivering a polished core feeling to the game

• Design for a diverse set of users (non-gamers to hardcore) and several use cases (1 to 4 players)

• Building game architecture for modularity and scalability

• Game balancing and economies for singleplayer and multiplayer

• Creating enemy behaviour and pathfinding systems from scratch

• Encounter Design and Level Design, employing the Situational Game Design framework to create playful situations

• Product management

• Game publishing and marketing

• Design of unobtrusive tutorials

• Using FMOD for sound design implementation

• Creating User Interface that enables localization to other languages

• Architectured the game’s memory management strategy, loading and unloading assets to ensure optimized performance.

Design Work samples:

🔗Enemy Design presentation

🔗Animation Cancelling & Input Buffering design presentation

🔗Article: How the player learns controls in Pulling No Punches

Awards:

Pulling No Punches won the 2 top honors at the SB Games awards in 2022.

• 🥇Best Professional Game

• 🥇Best Game (People's Choice)

See PDF document with winners here.

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• Steam: August 10 2022 by Braindead Broccoli
• Switch: May 25 2023 by QuByte Interactive

Ultra Foodmess is a competitive party game for up to 4 players in which food characters battle against each other in a variety of fast-paced modes. In the food mess, players will explode, shoot, swing, push and dodge to come out on top.

The game has been released for Steam (which is the version I worked on), Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.

In this project, I attained several skills, such as:

• Implementation and finetuning of game feel

• Implementation of local multiplayer

• Expanding and updating upon an existing project architecture

• Experience with Steam requirements such as gamepad functionality and Steam Achievements

• Reporting to leads and adjusting features according to feedback

The game is a commercial success and spawned a sequel, Ultra Foodmess 2 (released February 2024).

This is a project where JIBC (the Justice Institute of British Columbia) asked our team to develop a VR-based scenario to train police recruits on responding to active shooter situations.

The scenario is in the format of a single responding officer, from a first-person perspective, as they move through a building responding to various stimuli and ultimately engaging the active shooters.

In this project, I attained or upgraded some specific skills, such as:

• "3Cs" (Character, Camera and Controller) Design and Development 

• Civilian and Active Shooter character behaviours

• Breaking down features into asset requirements

• Collaborating with the team and client to produce feature requirements

• Usage of Speech-to-Text voice recognition in gameplay

• Design of voice-based immersive tutorials and interactions

• VR User Experience focused on first-time users

• Achieving immersion even when limited by mobile hardware (Oculus Quest 2 unhooked from PC)

• Iterated and finetuned multiple types of player locomotion

• Level Design for first-person perspective

• Redirected Walking iterations so that players are automatically redirected to the center of the play while moving to avoid bumping into walls

Archery Masters is a VR game prototype made by myself.

The player needs to aim precisely with their bow while trying to escape a dangerous mob of angry goblins.

Download and play the prototype here.

In this project, I attained or upgraded several skills, such as:

• 3Cs Hero design and implement in VR

• Prototyping and iterating on combat systems

• Exploration of player physicality against objects and enemies when playing in VR